Airtable

Pros

Interface is light and user friendly.
Highly visual.
Great selection of views.
Excellent collaboration support.
Integrates with large number of services.

Cons

Some formatting issues.
Can't link databases.

Bottom Line

Airtable may be the simplest database tool you'll ever use.
It lets you and your team manage information about anything at all with great ease.

11 Aug 2017

Airtable is a relational database tool that doubles as an online collaboration service. Before you brush it off as boring because of the word "database," take a good look at Airtable. It's highly visual and it facilitates meaningful conversation, too. Businesses might use it to manage CRM, and individuals might use it to create inventories of collections they own. Airtable is different from older database management systems because it looks like an app that anyone with an iPhone could use. And because you use Airtable to look at information differently, as you do with kanban boards, it makes the tool suitable for new, collaborative uses.

Airtable is the least intimidating database management system I've seen, and it comes with an excellent array of templates to help you understand how other people use it, too. It's the database management app for teams that don't ever want to use the word "database." It still has room to grow, but Airtable is already a great service for teams who need it.

Pricing and Plans

With a Free Airtable plan, you can create and manage as many databases as you need, and there are no limits on the number of people who can join the plan. There is a limit of 1,200 records per database, however, and you only get 2GB of storage space. You're also limited to 2 weeks of revision and snapshot history.

The Plus account is the next tier of service. It costs $12 per user per month; a discount for annual payment brings it down to the equivalent of $10 per person per month. With this plan, you also can have as many databases as you need, and the number of records per database increases to 5,000. The storage space increases to 5GB, and you get 6 months of revision and snapshot history.

The Pro account costs $24 per user per month, discounted to the equivalent of $20 per person per month when you pay annually. With this tier of service, the number of records per database increases to 50,000, and you get 20GB of space for attachments. You also get one year of revision and snapshot history, priority support, custom branded forms, personal views, and an extended color palette for dropdown fields.

Airtable offers an Enterprise account as well, but you have to contact the company for a price estimate. The company also has special offers for organizations that work in the nonprofit and education sectors. See Airtable's pricing and plan page for additional details.

Airtable is less expensive than Smartsheet, but pretty close in price. Smartsheet starts at $14 per user per month billed annually, and its Business plan costs $25 per user per month when billed annually.

Another app that shares some similarities but is not, strictly speaking, a database management tool is dapulse. It's difficult to compare prices directly, because dapulse charges a monthly rate for a batch of users, such as $29 per month for up to five people in its Basic plan (which works out to be less than $6 per person), or $352 per month for 25 people in the Pro plan (which works out to a little more than $14 per head).

Quick Base, another database system, charges fairly similar fees to Airtable's. It costs $15 per user per month (with a 10-person minimum) for an Essential plan, and $25 per user per month (with a 20-person minimum) for a Premier Plan.

Core Features

At its core, Airtable is an online system for creating and editing databases among a group of people, although you can certainly use it solo if you choose. A database is nothing more than a set of things grouped together, and Airtable takes that open definition seriously. You can use Airtable to manage information about nearly anything.

Another thing to note about Airtable is that it also contains aspects of spreadsheet software. It looks a whole lot like a spreadsheet at first, and for that reason, it's highly approachable.

As mentioned, Airtable comes with a helpful selection of templates, which suggest many of the different ways you can use Airtable. Templates are grouped into themes, such as Event Planning, Everyday Life, and Real Estate. Within those categories are specific templates; for example, in the category Groups, Clubs, and Hobbies, are templates for Book Catalog, Novel Planning, Photo Gear Tracker, Sneaker Collection, Soccer Club, and others. To give you a sense of some business uses, there are templates for Advertising Campaigns, Bug and Issue Tracker, Growth Experiments, User Studies, and so forth.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a key part of Airtable. When you invite others to join a database, you, in the Creator role, can give them one of three levels of permission. First is Creator. Anyone with Creator permissions has full access to the database, including the ability to change other people's permission levels and delete the whole thing. Second is Edit-Only. People with Edit-Only permission can add, delete, and modify both rows and views. Edit-Only users cannot modify field types (that is, the column). Third is Read-Only access, which means the person can only view the records and not edit them in any way.

To create a database, you can start one from a template, build one from scratch, or import data from somewhere else. You'll need a CSV file if you're going to upload anything, but another option for small databases is to simply copy and paste the contents into a window that Airtable provides. I tried it with a database that had only a handful of columns but more than 400 rows, and it worked without a hitch.

To get rolling with a database, you customize it the way you would with a spreadsheet. Should any number of rows or columns be frozen? What type of value will the various columns hold? Airtable keeps it light, with a friendly user interface that incorporates a lot of icons. Nothing about it seems intimidating.

The ability to create and save custom views in Airtable is another key feature, and one that further supports collaboration. In addition to the classic grid view, other options are Calendar, Gallery, or even Kanban. Kanban isn't just a way to view information differently. It's also a methodology for working. With Airtable, you and your teammates can create kanban boards and manage your work with them. You can easily switch from kanban view to a grid view when it helps to see tasks laid out in a different fashion.

Simple terminology and use of iconography make it easy to navigate Airtable and start customizing the views of databases. If you don't have extensive knowledge of how to use spreadsheet software, Airtable still feels very approachable. Rather than writing formulas using Excel's lingo, in Airtable, it feels more like you're telling the app, "Show me this, but not that."

Airtable does not have Gantt chart views, which are timeline views usually showing the duration of tasks and any dependencies among tasks. In all likelihood, if you needed Gantt chart views, you'd probably be better off with a project management app. A few other apps in the same vein as Airtable do have Gantt charts, however, including Smart Sheet and dapulse.

Cells in Airtable can expand into a full sheet of additional information, without reloading the page or opening a new window. When a cell is expanded, you can add much more detail that might not be relevant when you're examining the database as a grid. For example, in a home inventory database, you might want to reserve the grid view for easily seeing a list of everything you own and its value. But expand any cell, and you could see a wealth of additional information, such as uploaded warranties and receipts for the item, pictures of it, or just notes. Drag-and-drop uploading works, too. The expanded view gives you a place for comments, where you can use @ symbols before people's names to flag their attention.

Collaboration goes beyond just commenting. For example, if you use Airtable to assign and manage work, you could create a column with the field type Collaborator, and then assign any of your collaborators the task. If you link to a table or database of people for this field type, you can make sure that all the appropriate people show up as possible selections.

As you become a more expert Airtable user, which isn't hard to do given its plentiful tutorials, you can do more and more with it. You can even use it for project management, though some may find that a dedicated project management service is better equipped to handle that job.

Airtable for Personal Use

I noted earlier that you can use Airtable to manage any kind of collection, like a personal sneaker collection, for example. I asked some friends of mine who are collectors what sort of app they use to manage their collections. A vinyl record collector told me he uses Discogs, which is specific to music collecting. Another friend who likes wine said she uses the Wine Cellar app. A friend who has a storage room full of rare beer told me he doesn't currently have an app but limps along with Wine Cellar as it slowly caters to other kinds of bottle collections.

The point is that collectors often use a database management app that is specific to the thing they are collecting. The reason is those apps typically link to a database that has records of the items already. When my friend adds a wine to her collection, she does it with a barcode scanner. All the wine's information populates automatically, and she has to do little more than look it over for errors, and maybe add a note about where on her shelf she's storing it.

Any of these collections are suitable to manage in Airtable, but the disadvantage is the time it takes to set up and manually add entries. The advantage is that you can design the database to be exactly what you want it to be. If prefer convenience, you're better off scanning barcodes. If you like a lot of control, Airtable is a great tool.

Apps and Integrations

There are apps for Airtable for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. The service also works on the web. Airtable can also connect with a large number of other online services, such as Asana, Box, Google Drive, Basecamp, SMS Salesforce, Zendesk, Github, Trello, and even Instagram (for uploading images). If there's a service you need that isn't supported, you can try to connect it via Zapier or IFTTT, third-party services that connect other apps for you. That failing, you can get in touch with the company for access to its API.

What's Missing

When I looked at feature requests that Airtable users made online, I found that many of them had to do with formatting. One that caught my attention was Airtable's inability to wrap text in a table. With certain types of spreadsheets, people want to keep fairly lengthy text in cells, and they need to be able to see those details when in grid view. Airtable doesn't let you wrap text lines, however. A representative from the company responded to the feature request by saying it was a design choice to not allow variable row height. But it would surely be a detriment to productivity if you needed to be able to wrap text and didn't have the option. Note that when printing, you can display the full text as wrapped text. It just doesn't work when viewing a table on-screen.

Airtable fans have other gripes about formatting and displays, such as the inability to use conditional formatting (for example, if the cell value is "yes," then make it green). The company seems to be listening, however. One of the most requested features, the ability to export report data into charts and graphs, is already in beta for paying subscribers.

Also missing is the ability to connect databases to one another. With Airtable, however, you don't really need to create multiple databases pulling from the same data because you can instead have one database with multiple saved views. This solution may not be ideal for different teams that need to keep their collaborative comments private from one another, however.

The Easiest Database Tool

Airtable may be the least intimidating database management tool you'll ever use. It's made for people who want to understand the work they're doing and get it done efficiently, rather for than people who love working abstractly through numbers and symbols. Airtable feels easy, and the array of templates and tutorials guide you to exploring new ways you can use the system. Collaboration is well supported, and the price is fair. It's priced to be competitive with Smartsheet, and it is. I haven't reviewed enough similar software to declare an Editors' Choice yet, but Airtable is a very strong choice.

Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for computer scientists and students. She also spent five years as a writer and managing editor of Game Developer magazine, ... See Full Bio